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It's probably sad that I'm so proud of this.

Time spent vacuuming: 12 minutes. That includes doing the stairs with the extension wand and edge tool, and then swapping out the wand for the regular beater bar front, because I don't have a newfangled "onboard tools" vacuum, I've got a vintage 1982 Kirby that looks like a '57 Chevy and weighs approximately 3 tons. I wouldn't give it up for anything, either, because it's the only vacuum I've ever had that actually PICKS UP dirt instead of just pushing it around.

Time spent getting the living room READY to be vacuumed: 2 HOURS. Because I had two boxes of files and a big pile of papers that NEEDED to be filed strewn over the floor, from the things I've been doing the past couple of days that needed all that paperwork. So I spent two hours (in 15-minute chunks, with breaks) opening envelopes, filing the relevant contents, and shredding the envelopes and irrelevant stuff. I can empty the shredder basket twice into a paper grocery bag before I fill it. I dropped two full grocery bags of shreds into the single-stream recycling bin.

It's not YOU I'm comparing myself against, though. It's my mother(who else?), who, although she could not vacuum herself because of a rotator cuff injury, nevertheless kept the house tidy enough that my father could run the vacuum over all the public areas every weekend. When she went back to work when I was nine or so, the vacuuming duty shifted from my father to a cleaning service, but everything was still picked up enough to vacuum it on a weekly or biweekly basis. This probably represents a quarterly vacuuming, right now. (Sometimes I'm better.)

I should be easier on myself. My father was responsible for the household paperwork, and he had a tiny (dorm single size?) office with a door that shut, and believe me it NEVER got vacuumed in there, and there were always piles on the desk (a hollow-core door balanced on two two-drawer filing cabinets). I don't have an office. My office is a large rolltop desk and a two-drawer filing cabinet NEXT to it, right in the living room. So if that quarter of the room looks like my dad's never-cleaned office, there's a good reason for that. And if I need to use the rest of the floor space to actively do the filing, that only makes sense, because there's a large printer/scanner/copier taking up the space on my desk where my dad had piles of papers.

I don't suck as much as I THINK I suck. But the memory of my mother's supremely tidy midcentury modern house with all its open space haunts me.

Your mother's supremely tidy midcentury modern house with all its open space was vaguely soul-destroying, you know.

Hello, why do you think I went for Victorian and Victorian-inspired furniture and fringed Austrian valances and all that stuff? Still, there's a difference between cozy assortments of objects and the Perfesser's desk from Shoe.

And if you think the Lexington house was troublesome, you'd be horrified at pocketpolina's parents' house. Take my parents' house. Make it a raised ranch. Then think gleaming expanses of hardwood floor and sleek furniture you'd be afraid to sit on. That house scares me.

(btw, did you make the icon yourself? Timing the animation frames to most people's reading speed can be tricky; that one's a little fast.)

I don't have that skillset; I swiped it off someone else's LJ. It blinks at MY reading speed, which I'll admit is a little fast for most people, but it also meant I didn't notice a problem.

also, i am anti-vacuum cleaners; when i was fourteen or so i was using one and a belt snapped and it started smoking and never again have i fully trusted one of those damn things. so i am impressed at your dedication; i will create any excuse to never touch a vacuum again.